A bronze water vessel believed to have been looted from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace in 1860 and auctioned off to a mystery buyer for $515,000 months ago has made its way back to China.

“Welcome home, ‘Tiger Ying!’” state news agency Xinhua wrote on one of its Weibo accounts Tuesday, saying the antique, which is named for the tiger-shaped handle on its lid, is now part of the collection of the National Museum of China. Xinhua offered no other details about how the museum obtained the Tiger Ying.

The Tiger Ying went under the hammer in the UK this April, despite Chinese calls to boycott the sale of the item, which was taken by a British soldier during the second Opium War, The Art Newspaper reported. The vessel had been discovered in an attic in Kent in March and is believed to date from the Western Zhou period, meaning it’s around 3,000 years old. It eventually ended up in the hands of an anonymous bidder, and disappeared from headlines for a few months.

Valuable artifacts removed from the Old Summer Palace and other parts of the country during the 19th and 20th centuries have long been a sore point for China, which has called for objects like the Tiger Ying to be treated as stolen goods and returned. At the same time, Chinese entrepreneurs as well as a privately funded group, the China Cultural Relics Recover Programme, have been buying back a large number of artifacts over the past two decades.

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