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Rings from the Lombok treasure (Photos: National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden)
were returned. The formal transfer took place on April 24, 1978, in Jakarta at the occasion of the two hundredth birthday of the Museum Nasional. It received about half of all Lombok objects in the Netherlands. Based on the 1977 agreement, many Lombok treasures remained in the Netherlands. They can be seen in the Leiden museum. It cannot be excluded that other objects that were looted at Lombok but miss nowadays a clear provenance, are in other museums in the Netherlands.14 Colonial collections On two occasions colonial collections were returned. One concerned archaeological materials for the Antilles island of Aruba in the period that Aruba became an independent country within the Kingdom. In 1985 the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden returned 4.500 pre-Columbian fragments to Aruba. As a number of fragments had unintentionally not been returned, the National Archaeological Anthropological Memory Management (NAAM) of the Netherlands Antilles and the museum are in 2012 negotiating about it.15 The other was for Indonesia. Next to the Lombok treasure, the 1977 shipment contained the 13th century stone Prajñaparamita that the National Museum of Ethnology had to let go. The departure of this top piece of the Leiden museum – a portrait of
one of the most important queens of ancient Java, called by some the Mona Lisa of Asia – caused pain.16 The statue acquired a prominent place in the Museum Nasional in Jakarta. Several regional museums in Indonesia are showing copies. The Indonesians are lending it out every now and then to the Netherlands. Museum Bronbeek in Arnhem had to let go what it had in its collection of the outfit of the Indonesian national hero, Prince Pangeran Diponegoro: a red saddle with stirrups, the bridle of his horse, a pajong or umbrella, and Diponegoro’s spear. Diponegoro had led a revolt against the Dutch colonizers between 1825 and 1830. When he was arrested, he handed in his weaponry and regalia. The museum had acquired the objects from private collections in 1865 and 1869. The Dutch state returned them in 1978 to Indonesia. The case followed the same line as those of the Lombok treasure and the Prajñaparamita. It deserves mentioning for what was not returned of Diponegoro’s outfit, his keris, although the Museum Bronbeek explicitly denies to have ever held it. The keris is dealt with in part 3 of this book. Finally, the painting Arrest of Pangeran Diponegoro by the Indonesian painter Raden Saleh went to Indonesia. When Diponegoro had died in 1855, Raden Saleh asked permission
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