What do you think about this?
In the final months of World War II, as the Imperial Japanese Army was being pushed out of the Philippines, a general named Tomoyuki Yamashita allegedly oversaw the burial of a fortune the world had never seen on one map before.
We are talking about a stockpile pulled from every country Japan had occupied. Gold bars, platinum, gemstones, religious relics, looted bank reserves from Singapore to Shanghai to Manila. Some estimates run into the hundreds of billions of dollars at today’s prices.
The story goes that Yamashita’s engineers buried it in over a hundred sites across the island of Luzon, then sealed the tunnels with the prisoners of war who dug them. Yamashita was hanged for war crimes in 1946. The maps, if they ever existed, were divided up among officers, smuggled out, lost, or quietly handed to powers who had reasons of their own to keep things buried.
In 1988, a Filipino treasure hunter named Rogelio Roxas filed a lawsuit claiming he had found a chamber including a one ton solid gold Buddha, and that Ferdinand Marcos had it confiscated. A Hawaii court eventually sided with the Roxas estate, in a judgment that still reads like fiction.
People are still digging Luzon today. Caves, mountainsides, old monasteries, places marked on hand drawn maps that pass between families and never make the news.
Could it be the largest treasure in human history is sitting under our feet, and the people who know where will never tell us?
