Yamashita’s gold

The claim is that loot plundered across occupied Asia was hidden in caves and tunnels here as the Japanese position collapsed in 1945. Historians are largely unconvinced there was ever one organised hoard, and decades of tunnelling have wrecked ground and killed treasure hunters. It is not pure invention either: in Roxas v. Marcos the Hawaii courts heard a case in which a treasure hunter said he found a golden buddha and was robbed of it, and a very large judgment followed. Read it as genuinely contested history with a real legal record, and note that unpermitted digging here is illegal.