A Treasure Hunter Discovered a Legendary WWII Gold Hoard. Then a Dictator Came Knocking.

7 min read

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• During WWII, Japanese forces plundered Southeast Asia and allegedly buried a fortune in the Philippines.
• Decades later, a Filipino locksmith discovered gold in an underground tunnel near Baguio City.
• After a dictator seized his treasure by force, the locksmith pursued justice he'd never see.

Deep in a tunnel in the mountains near Baguio City, Rogelio Roxas could only stare in awe. He was standing in front of a three-foot-tall statue of Buddha fashioned in the traditional manner, with hands folded and eyes closed in eternal meditation. The unusual thing about the statue was that it appeared to be made of solid gold. Roxas immediately understood that it could be part of the rumored treasure that Japanese forces had buried in the Philippines near the end of their brutal occupation of the archipelago during WWII. Then Roxas noticed something strange about the Buddha’s head. After a moment, he realized that it could be removed. What he glimpsed when he looked inside was no less than astounding.

What Roxas had just discovered was believed to be plunder from Operation Golden Lily. As Allied military forces closed in on every front of the Pacific theater, the Japanese Imperial Army scrambled to hide the vast wealth it had been looting from occupied lands throughout Southeast Asia since as early as 1937. According to researchers Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, the operation was headed by Prince Chichibu, brother of Emperor Hirohito. The looters, who allegedly included military forces, intelligence operatives, and yakuza gangsters, had pillaged bank vaults and trampled sacred temples across a dozen Asian nations. Entire countries went bankrupt. Much of the stolen gold was reportedly melted down into bullion to disguise its origins.

The man whose name became synonymous with the buried treasure was General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the ruthless commander known as the “Tiger of Malaya,” who oversaw Japanese forces in the Philippines during the war’s final months. Yamashita was later tried for war crimes and hanged in February 1946. But according to legend, before the war ended, Yamashita and his forces hid ancient artifacts, rare books, priceless art, religious objects such as the Buddha, and enormous quantities of gold, silver, and precious jewels in as many as 175 locations throughout the Philippines. Legend holds that Yamashita was so intent on keeping these riches hidden that workers and soldiers who built the underground vaults were sealed alive inside them once the caches were filled and closed up. All told, “Yamashita's gold” has been estimated at a value of $100 billion or more, although most historians and Filipino experts caution there’s no credible evidence that the treasure is really that large.

Following the war, treasure hunters determined to unearth Yamashita’s hidden riches searched with no verified success. But then, in 1961, a former Filipino soldier turned locksmith named Rogelio Roxas (also known as Roger) received a tantalizing lead. In Baguio City, he met a man named Fuchigami whose father had served in the Japanese army. Fuchigami shared a hand-drawn map purporting to show the location of buried treasure. Not long afterward, Roxas met a second man who claimed to have served as an interpreter under Yamashita. He said he’d witnessed gold being hidden in underground tunnels. There was just one obstacle standing in the way of a search.

When the dictator Ferdinand Marcos rose to power in the Philippines in 1965—along with his wife Imelda, who later became famous for her collection of thousands of designer shoes—he was already wealthy, but his kleptocratic instincts reportedly made him obsessed with finding the riches said to be buried underground. Marcos commanded his military to investigate suspected sites and mandated that every legitimate treasure hunter had to apply for a permit that would reveal where they intended to dig. This essentially forced them into working for Marcos indirectly. Despite the system’s obviously corrupt motives, Roxas obeyed the law. In 1970, he obtained a permit from Judge Pio Marcos, a local judge and relative of the president, who informed Roxas that under Philippine law, thirty percent of any discovered treasure would have to be paid to the government. But Roxas had an advantage. Baguio, the city where he lived, was in the mountainous region of northern Luzon where Japanese forces had operated extensively during the war, and where Yamashita himself had signed his formal surrender in 1945.

Roxas assembled a team of laborers and began excavating on state-owned land near Baguio General Hospital. For seven grueling months, the team dug around the clock. Then they broke into a system of underground tunnels. Inside, they found wiring, radios, bayonets, rifles, and a human skeleton still dressed in a Japanese army uniform—the remains of someone entombed when the tunnels were sealed. As gruesome as this discovery was, it convinced Roxas he was on to something. The team continued digging for several more weeks until they discovered a ten-foot-thick concrete enclosure in the tunnel floor. On January 24, 1971, they finally broke through.

That’s where Roxas discovered the golden Buddha. It was so heavy (he estimated it weighed one metric ton) that it required ten men, a chain block hoist, ropes, and rolling logs to bring it to the surface. When Roxas later removed the statue’s head, he found handfuls of uncut diamonds inside. And that wasn't all. Beneath the concrete enclosure, Roxas found stacks upon stacks of wooden boxes, each roughly the size of a case of beer, covering an area six feet wide by thirty feet long, stacked five or six high. When he opened one box, he found it held 24 bars of gold. He packed up the 24 gold bars and some samurai swords, then sealed the tunnel entrance behind him.

Roxas made no effort to conceal his find. He posed with the Buddha for newspaper photographers and showed it to prospective buyers, two of whom tested the metal and declared it solid gold of at least 20 carats. But his triumph was doomed to be short-lived. Word of his find reached Marcos in the presidential palace.

At 2:30 a.m. on April 5, 1971, a group of men in military uniforms arrived at the Roxas home. They showed a paper they claimed was a search warrant signed by Judge Pio Marcos. They beat Roxas’s brother with their rifles and terrorized the family. When they left, they took the Buddha, the diamonds, 17 gold bars, samurai swords, a coin collection belonging to his wife, and even the children’s piggy bank. Within minutes, the spoils of the search Roxas had dedicated years to had vanished.

Roxas went to the police and the media. He confronted Judge Pio Marcos, who admitted he’d signed the warrant on Marcos’s orders—and warned Roxas that his life was now in danger. Accusations against Marcos made newspaper headlines. Shortly afterward, the military deposited a Buddha statue at the Baguio City courthouse. But when Roxas arrived and laid eyes on the statue, he immediately knew it wasn’t the same one. It was a different color and its head wasn’t removable. He declared it a fake. Marcos had underestimated him.

Unfortunately for the treasure hunter, there was no affront to Marcos that went without consequences. In May 1971, Roxas was arrested and held captive for weeks. Marcos’s men tortured him: they shocked him with wires attached to a car battery, burned him with cigarettes, and beat him with a rubber mallet until he signed an affidavit stating that the raid on his home had been “performed in a peaceful manner.” Roxas escaped by picking a window lock (he was, after all, a locksmith), but Marcos wasn’t done with him. In 1972, he was arrested again on trumped-up weapons charges and imprisoned until November 1974. Roxas’s family was torn apart by the ordeal. He separated from his wife, and his children grew up largely without their father, who spent years either in hiding or in prison.

It wasn’t until the popular revolution of 1986 forced Marcos from power and sent him fleeing to Hawaii that Roxas finally had a chance at justice. When the new government gained access to Malacañang Palace, they discovered documents linking Marcos to secret overseas bank accounts, along with Imelda’s famous collection of shoes, which was estimated at over 2,700 pairs. In 1992, Imelda Marcos publicly claimed that the family’s enormous wealth had come from Yamashita’s gold, not from the fraud and embezzlement everyone suspected.

With Marcos in exile, Roxas filed a lawsuit in Hawaii in 1988, seeking compensation for his torture, false imprisonment, and the theft of his treasure. But Roxas would never see the case go to trial. He died on May 25, 1993, in Baguio City. The official cause of death was tuberculosis, but no autopsy was performed. His attorney noted the suspicious timing: Roxas died just days before he was scheduled to provide key testimony. Ferdinand Marcos had already died in exile in 1989.

The case continued after both men were gone. In 1996, a jury in Honolulu found Marcos posthumously liable and awarded a staggering $22 billion in damages. At the time, it was the largest civil damages award ever handed down in the United States. However, in 1998, the Hawaii Supreme Court reversed the $22 billion portion, ruling that the evidence for the value of the unopened gold boxes was too speculative. The damages were ultimately reduced to approximately $19 million, including $6 million for Roxas’s torture and false imprisonment and $13 million for the golden Buddha and gold bars. To this day, the Roxas estate has struggled to collect even this reduced amount from the Marcos family.

The tragic tale of Rogelio Roxas hasn’t stopped treasure hunters from continuing to search for the other caches that Japanese forces are said to have hidden across the Philippines, and some have paid with their lives. Over the decades, dozens of searchers have died in cave collapses, from toxic gas exposure, or from suffocation in unstable tunnels. In March 2024 alone, four men suffocated inside a cave in Bukidnon province while searching for Yamashita’s gold. For many, including Roxas, the price of gold proved far too high.