For centuries, it was nothing more than a statue.

The seated figure of the Buddha, with its gold-painted face and round features, had been kept

at a temple in China since at least the 14th century.

But a few years ago, it started to do some traveling.

That was when the government of China loaned it to a museum in the Netherlands.

As you might imagine, the process of transporting something that hadn't been moved in centuries

made it possible to see new things.

And this statue turned out to be more than it appeared.

After some restoration work revealed some mysterious clues, experts took the statue to

a local hospital for a CT scan.

Think of it like a three-dimensional X-ray, allowing them to build a virtual model of

anything inside the statue.

What they found though blew them away.

It was the mummified body of a human being.

Since then, further research has netted experts more answers.

Most agree that the body inside the gilded statue are the remains of a Buddhist monk who died

at the beginning of the 12th century.

A couple of centuries after that, his body was encased inside the statue, and then time

did what it's so good at, helping people forget the secret inside.

But there's a bigger lesson here that I want to point out.

For centuries, people passed by this statue and assumed that was all it is.

They glanced over the stylized carvings of a smiling face and crossed legs and admired

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