The Piprahwa Stupa Opened in January 1898 Held a Soapstone Casket With an Early Brahmi Inscription Naming the Sakyas, and the Gems From Its Deposit Came Back to India on 30 July 2025 After a Hong Kong Auction Was Halted

In January 1898 William Claxton Peppé, an English engineer who managed the Birdpur estate in Basti district, cut a well down the middle of a brick mound at Piprahwa and found a sandstone coffer holding five reliquaries. One soapstone casket in it carries a line of early Brahmi letters that speaks of the relics of the Buddha and of the Sakyas, the clan into which he was born.

The jewels from that deposit that stayed with Peppé’s descendants were due to be auctioned in Hong Kong on 7 May 2025. A legal notice from India’s Ministry of Culture led Sotheby’s to postpone the sale, and on 30 July 2025 the ministry announced that the gems had come home in partnership with the Godrej Industries Group. The Piprahwa exposition opened in New Delhi on 3 January 2026, and from 31 October 2026 relics from the National Museum are on a three-week tour of monasteries in Arunachal Pradesh.

What Peppé found at the centre

Piprahwa lies in Siddharthnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, just south of the Nepal border. Peppé’s own report puts the mound half a mile from the frontier, and Harry Falk, the Berlin epigraphist, gives the distance from Lumbini as about 15 kilometres. Peppé had cut a trench across the top in 1897. In October of that year Vincent Smith of the Indian Civil Service inspected it and told him that anything inside would lie at the centre, probably near ground level.

In the first days of January 1898 Peppé dug a ten-foot-square well down the middle. A clay-filled pipe ran down through the brickwork, and after 18 feet of solid brick he reached a stone slab, the lid of a sandstone coffer. The lid had broken into four pieces under the weight above it, yet the coffer was still sealed. Peppé calculated the weight of the coffer with its lid at 1,537 pounds, and Falk puts it at close to 700 kilograms.

Inside were two soapstone vases, a lota-shaped soapstone vessel, a small soapstone box and a crystal bowl whose lid had a hollow fish-shaped handle packed with gold-leaf stars. Peppé wrote that the soapstone vessels had been turned on a lathe and that the crystal was polished to perfection. The vessels held pieces of bone and several hundred small objects: gold ornaments and gold leaf stamped with a lion, an elephant and a woman’s figure, pearls, and beads cut from cornelian, amethyst, topaz, garnet, coral and crystal. Smith compared the deposit with the one Alexander Rea had dug up at Bhattiprolu in 1892, which has its own article, and judged the Piprahwa collection the richer of the two.

Peppé gave the mound a base diameter of 116 feet and a surviving height of 21.65 feet. Smith read the large bricks as characteristic of the Ashokan period. Falk argues that brick size is a weak guide because early builders worked from a standard measure that varied from architect to architect.

The line on the casket lid

The inscription runs round the lid of one of the soapstone vessels. The Indian Museum in Kolkata, which holds the casket, describes it as steatite, 15.2 centimetres high, with a text in Mauryan Brahmi that begins Sukitibhatinam and ends Budhasa Bhagavate Sakiyanam.

Georg Bühler of Vienna received an eye-copy at the end of January 1898 and sent his reading on 21 February. He translated it as the relic-shrine of the divine Buddha, the donation of the Sakya Sukiti brothers with their sisters, sons and wives. Auguste Barth in Paris, working from another copy, read it in substance the same way. Smith, in the note printed with Peppé’s report, preferred to take Sukiti as an adjective meaning renowned rather than a name, a suggestion he credited to William Hoey. On the question of whether the bone was the Buddha’s, he wrote that the depositors believed it was and that whether they were right “no man can say”.

J. F. Fleet read the text differently in 1906. He took it to record relics of the Sukiti brethren, who were the Buddha’s own Sakya kinsmen, and not relics of the Buddha himself. The reading Falk reports as agreed after 1898, set out in H. Lüders’s 1912 list of Brahmi inscriptions, runs close to Bühler’s: the receptacle of the relics of the Buddha, of the Sakyas, is the gift of the brothers of Sukiti with their sisters, sons and wives. Falk, writing in 2013, goes a step further. He reads the key word nidhana as the act of enshrining and takes the text to say that the Sakyas installed the whole stupa for the Buddha’s relics. A few later writers, among them T. A. Phelps and A. Huxley, whom Falk names, have argued that the inscription is a forgery. Falk examines their points and finds that none stands.

The date is argued from the letters and the brickwork. The Indian Museum labels the casket about the third century BCE, and The Art Newspaper dates the burial to about 240 to 200 BCE. Falk reads the letter forms as Ashokan and writes that an origin in the later part of the third century BCE is “not at all impossible”. He puts the first stupa, with its base chambers and coffer, at around 200 BCE.

Where the 1898 finds went

The colonial government claimed the find under an 1878 law on buried finds, according to The Federal. Most of the jewellery and the inscribed casket went to the Indian Museum in Kolkata. The Art Newspaper records that the bone fragments were given to the King of Siam, Rama V, and later distributed to shrines in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and that Peppé was allowed to keep about a fifth of the collection, some 350 gems.

Counts differ by source. NBC News gives 334 gems in the 2025 sale and describes them as part of a cache of more than 1,800 artefacts, most of them in Kolkata. The Art Newspaper speaks of around 1,800 jewels in the whole find.

Two more caskets from the 1970s

The Archaeological Survey of India dug again at Piprahwa under K. M. Srivastava. Its review for 1971-72 reports that the main stupa “yielded another two relic caskets, containing charred bones”. The caskets are soapstone, turned on a lathe like Peppé’s. The review adds that an earlier mud stupa lay inside the brick one, and that two brick containers about 6 metres below the top of the surviving stupa held the caskets, at a lower level than Peppé’s coffer. It says it remained to be established whether the new relics were earlier.

The Ministry of Culture’s release of 30 October 2026 says the larger casket held 12 bone fragments and the smaller 10, 22 in all, of which 20 are at the National Museum in New Delhi and two at the Indian Museum. The accounts do not agree on dates. The ASI’s annual review lists the caskets under 1971-72. Falk places Srivastava’s trench in 1973 to 1974 and records that K. Werner saw the find-places in April 1976, a day after the reliquaries were removed. Falk also notes that the German scholar H. Härtel doubted the trustworthiness of Srivastava’s report, and he accepts the find on Werner’s evidence. He writes that the contents could be other parts of the relics divided in Ashokan times, or ashes of respected monks, and that nothing should be excluded.

The same digs found the monastery to the east of the stupa, with 33 cells around a courtyard. The ASI’s review for 1972-73 reports 31 clay sealings from its verandah, in Brahmi letters it assigned to the first or second century CE, reading Om Devaputra Vihare Kapilavastu Bhikshu Sanghasa, the order of monks of Kapilavastu. Falk reads the script as Gupta in type and counts about seven hundred years between the Buddha’s Kapilavastu and these seals.

Kapilavastu, Piprahwa and Tilaurakot

The seals led the ASI to place Kapilavastu, the Sakya capital, in the immediate neighbourhood of the stupa. The review for 1974-75 describes two large brick complexes at Ganwaria, a kilometre away, with an earliest occupation placed in the eighth century BCE on the evidence of pottery, and says they “hardly leave any doubt” of being the residence of the chief of Kapilavastu. Falk lists Ganwaria with two monasteries, and he cites recent excavations reported by B. R. Mani and P. K. Mishra in 2013, which found that the Buddhist compounds at Piprahwa did not stand on city ground.

Nepal makes a rival claim for Tilaurakot, about 25 kilometres north-west of Lumbini by Falk’s count. Excavation there in 2001 found occupation of the seventh to fifth centuries BCE, and the co-director Robin Coningham told Archaeology magazine there was little reason to doubt the nineteenth-century identification. Durham University’s later project dates the first occupation to the eighth century BCE and the fortification to the sixth. Falk argues from the distances in the accounts of Faxian and Xuanzang, which this article on the Chinese pilgrims covers, and which put Lumbini about 14.5 to 16 kilometres east of Kapilavastu, that Piprahwa fits them better than Tilaurakot does. Scholars have not settled the question.

The auction and the return

Sotheby’s Hong Kong had scheduled the Piprahwa Gems of the Historical Buddha for 7 May 2025 and, AFP reported, dated them to around 200 BCE. The Ministry of Culture served a legal notice on 5 May that called the gems the inalienable religious and cultural heritage of India and the global Buddhist community, and said the sale would violate Indian and international law. It asked for the sale to be cancelled, the gems returned, an apology and the provenance papers. On 7 May Sotheby’s said it was postponing the sale “in light of the matters raised by the Government of India and with the agreement of the consignors”.

NBC News reported that the 334 gems were expected to fetch upward of 100 million Hong Kong dollars, about 12.9 million US dollars. Chris Peppé, a great-grandson of the excavator and one of the heirs, had written for Sotheby’s that his great-grandfather gave the relics to the government and the family kept only the duplicates it was allowed to retain, as The Federal quotes him. The Indian government said he lacked the authority to sell, according to NBC. The Art Newspaper reported two months of talks between the Peppé heirs, Delhi and Godrej. The Ministry of Culture announced on 30 July 2025 that the gems had returned through a public-private partnership with the Godrej Industries Group. Sotheby’s declined to disclose the price.

The 2026 exposition

On 3 January 2026 the Prime Minister inaugurated “The Light & the Lotus: Relics of the Awakened One” at the Rai Pithora Cultural Complex in New Delhi. The Prime Minister’s Office release says it brought together, for the first time, the repatriated gems with relics and antiquities from Piprahwa kept at the National Museum and the Indian Museum. A model inspired by the Sanchi stupa sits at the centre. All India Radio reported on 7 January that the exposition would run for six months, open daily from 9 am to 9 pm. Another object came home that May, the Anaimangalam copper plates.

The Ministry of Culture’s release of 30 October 2026 sets out the Arunachal Pradesh tour with the Government of Arunachal Pradesh, the International Buddhist Confederation and the National Museum. Public viewing is scheduled at Tawang Monastery from 1 to 7 November, at the Lower Gompa in Bomdila from 8 to 13 November and at the Golden Pagoda in Namsai from 14 to 20 November, with the return to the National Museum on 21 November. The release says timings and movements stay subject to operational, weather and security considerations. NorthEast Now reported that the relics reached Tawang on 31 October, and as of 2 November 2026 the tour is under way, with the relics due back at the National Museum on 21 November.