Rumtek's rival succession claims, told in its first article, leave out the monastery's most striking material inheritance: a set of relics and ritual objects whose custody the dispute has left genuinely unresolved. When the sixteenth Karmapa fled Tibet for Sikkim in 1959, his party carried out priceless manuscripts and images ahead of the destruction that would soon reach Tibetan monasteries generally, including a complete one hundred eight volume canon of the Buddha's teachings, reinstalled once reconstruction was complete, forming the core of what the monastery still holds.
Chief among Rumtek's treasures is the Black Crown itself, a physical object with an origin story centuries older than the current dispute. Tradition holds that in 1407 the Yongle Emperor of Ming China, receiving the fifth Karmapa at his court, perceived him wearing an invisible crown woven by dakinis from their own hair, visible only to beings of sufficient spiritual attainment; the emperor then commissioned a material likeness of that vision, a black crown set with gold and jewels, and presented it to the fifth Karmapa as a physical stand in for what he alone could see.
Following the sixteenth Karmapa's death in 1981, his relics were placed inside a golden stupa built at Rumtek specifically to hold them, finished the following year and adorned with turquoise and coral alongside its gold. The Black Crown's own present whereabouts, by contrast, are not settled fact: accounts differ on where it is kept and who holds it, a direct consequence of the same custody dispute that has left neither rival Karmapa installed at Rumtek itself, so the object built to make one recognized Karmapa visible now sits, however visible or hidden it actually is, outside either claimant's confirmed reach.