An order of Buddhist monks in South Korea were shocked in the summer of 1989 when their temple was ransacked during a violent thunderstorm. Thieves had posed as hikers to enter the grounds of the Bomunsa temple in the North Gyeongsang province, and they sped away in a beige van with four sacred paintings.

For years, guilt and anguish haunted the temple’s abbot, Ham Tae-wan. Two of the stolen paintings were eventually recovered in 2014 after an extensive search in South Korea, and the thieves were prosecuted. But the trail of the last two paintings ran cold. More years passed, and the abbot became despondent.

“I have blamed myself for failing to safeguard these Buddhist paintings that are objects of faith in Korea,” he wrote in a letter. “Not just art.”

Then, in 2023, Korean government officials discovered something surprising: One of the missing paintings appeared in the online collections database for the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, listed under the wrong title. Officials alerted the monks.

In August of that year, the museum received a letter from Jinwoo, president of the Jogye Order, Korea’s largest sect of Buddhism. “I hope that the museum will work with us amicably on this matter so this sacred Buddhist painting can be returned,” the president said.

It is never a positive story when a stolen religious object from Asia is discovered in a Western museum. But the tale of the painting’s return is an example of how Western cultural institutions can sometimes use the repatriation process to mend relationships with cultural and religious groups in other parts of the world.